Jobs, Categories, and Departments are all used to assist with tracking your transactions. All can be used to create separate Profit & Loss statements and to filter additional reports. Only Categories can be used to create a separate Balance Sheet.

Departments and Categories are generally used to track different departments within in a company. For example someone may use Departments or Categories to track retail vs commercial sales. Jobs are generally used to track a specific job and have many more features than Departments and Categories.

Departments and Categories can be assigned an ID, Name, and Description. Jobs can be assigned much more including budgets, a linked customer, percent completion, promised/start/finish date, job status, and more. Jobs also allow for tracking reimbursable expenses.

Categories are more broad while Jobs and Departments are more specific. For example on a sale a Category can only be assigned once for the entire sale, while a different Job or Department can be assigned on each specific line item. This can make Category tracking quicker to use but doesn’t allow as much detail. This also allows Category tracking to be added to balance sheet accounts to prepare a category based Balance Sheet.

Jobs and Categories can be printed out on your invoices while Departments cannot.

Departments can be assigned to all card file types. Jobs can only be assigned to Customer card file types. Categories cannot be assigned to card files.